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Vier Duette, Op 34

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

Love is a rose-tree. Where does it bloom? In our garden, of course, Where we two, my love and I, Faithfully tend it, In return for which, in gratitude, It blooms afresh every day. And if roses bloom in heaven, They could not bloom with greater beauty.

Love is a small stream. Where does it flow? In our garden, of course, With many waves and much joy And pleasures of every kind. It also reflects the surrounding world, Making it more lovely by far. We travel on that stream as happily As little birds fly through the air.

Love is a bright star. Where does it shine? In our garden, of course. Ah, tell me, my love, why do you often Leave me waiting so long? For if I do not see you every hour, The star burns my heart away; But when you come, it gently climbs the sky, Like the sun in May.

This is the most Mendelssohnian piece in Op 34 in that it relies on gracious melody for its effect. It is also the least performed of all the Schumann duets, probably because the music looks rather plain and simple on the printed page, and also because the tessitura of the tenor line is demandingly high. It is the kind of music that is punishing for an effortful singer, and as natural as breathing for one who has an easy control of the passaggio. This is more or less a strophic construction – three verses which are almost, but not quite, the same. Schumann rings the changes by allowing solo moments for the two voices at different times in each strophe. (In the final verse there are fewer of these solos which results in a fuller vocal texture.)

This duet is in A major, a favourite of this composer when it comes to music that is fresh with the fragrance of spring and the magic of the outdoors. A glance at the key words in the duet remind us of other Schumann songs in this tonality. The title Liebesgarten brings to mind Mein Garten and the word ‘Rosenstrauch’ reminds us of Röselein, Röselein! – both of these songs are in A minor/major. The sprightly A major flowering of Jasminenstrauch also comes to mind, as does that paean to spring Er ist’s, and the Mendelssohnian scherzo Aufträge in the same key. The final words of Reinick’s poem finally place the song in a month of the year – it is May of course; and then we remember that the perennial Im wunderschönen Monat Mai (the opening song of Dichterliebe) is also written in three sharps. In all of these pieces there is a vernal glow that seems associated with nature, a clarity and luminosity that suggests A major to the composer’s ear.

The time signature is 6/8 and here Schumann has embraced the time-honoured pastoral tradition whereby innocent music for shepherds and shepherdesses rocks gently in compound time. In less gifted hands there might have been a danger of monotony in this rhythm were it not for the enchanting naturalness of the gently unfurling melody. The poet allows the questioning second line of each strophe (‘Wo blüht er?’, ‘Wo zieht er?’ and finally ‘Wo glüht er?’) to stand alone in the versification, indented and hanging expectantly on an answer. Typically, Schumann in the first two strophes allows time (a two-bar interlude) for the singers to ponder these almost rhetorical questions, and then to answer them. This seems a small point, but it is a vital aspect of the composer’s sensitivity to a poet’s intention. His music enables the poetry to speak coherently and naturally – as if it were being recited by an actor capable of allowing the words to breathe and to pause at the right moments. In the third verse there is no such musical gap at this point, but the unhesitating answer (‘Ei nun, in unserm Garten’ – the same words as in the first verse) conveys a sense of triumphant conviction which has been won only after the singers have gone through the doubt and the questioning of the preceding strophes. We feel that the love between the singers has grown stronger before our very ears, during this very performance. An eight-bar section at the end (with an additionally assertive ‘Ja’ inserted by the composer) serves as a coda. The music, a symphony of euphonious thirds and sixths between the voices, gives an impression of domestic ease and sweetness while being far from suitable for home performers: in terms of its tessitura alone this piece is too difficult for anyone but the most skilled professionals.

The poem is to be found on page 8 of one of the most beautiful books of the Romantic period, certainly the most attractive of all Schumann’s literary sources from a visual point of view. This is the collection by Robert Reinick with a green and gold cover proudly announcing Lieder und Bilder – here was someone who could both write poetry and illustrate it. The exquisitely engraved title page announces Lieder eines Malers – ‘Songs of a Painter’. This was in fact an artistic riposte to the extraordinary 1830 Skizzenbuch (‘Sketchbook’) of Reinick’s friend Franz Kugler (poet of Brahms’s famous song Ständchen) which had included poetry, pictures and music by the same hand. Reinick’s book (published in Düsseldorf in 1838) was also the source of Schumann’s Op 36 cycle. Four of the six songs of that work (An den Sonnenschein, Dichters Genesung, Ständchen and Sonntags am Rhein) are illustrated in full-page engravings. Liebesgarten is one of the poems which does not have a separate illustration. There will be a biography of Robert Reinick in Volume 11 of the Hyperion Schumann Edition. He was one of the poets who was to become a personal friend of the Schumanns only after the composer had set his words to music. It seems clear that Schumann had discovered Liebesgarten at the same time as he had composed his Op 36 and set it to one side for different treatment. Mention of ‘wir zwei, mein Lieb und ich’ (‘we two, my love and I’) as well as ‘in unserm Garten’ (‘in our garden’) immediately implies two voices. This may have been the beginning of the composer’s determination to write a set of duets in a year that had been dominated by solo lieder.

This extraordinary piece of music announces a new kind of song-duet, infinitely more ambitious than Liebesgarten. Reinick was a living poet and Schumann had respected his versification; but Robert Burns, an eighteenth-century Scottish poet published in German translation by Wilhelm Gerhard in 1840, was another matter. Schumann had already composed nine beautiful but simple solo Burns settings in this year (eight appeared in Myrten, one in Op 27) and perhaps now he thought it was time to be more adventurous.

Who is at my bedroom door? It’s me! Be off with you, what d’you want here? Something very sweet! You’ve come in the dark just like a thief. Why not catch me, then? Don’t you love me just a little? With all my heart!

And what if I opened the door as you ask? Open it! That would be the end of sleep and rest! Let them be! Are you a dove in a dovecote? With its mate! Will you coo until dawn? Most likely!

No, I’ll never let you in! Do it all the same! I’ll bet you’d want to come each day? I’d love to! How presumptuous and brazen you are! Then may I? As long as you don’t tell a soul! Of course not!

One blames neither the translator of this poem nor Schumann for the fact that Robert Burns is such an astoundingly modern poet that any nineteenth-century version of his work, whether a translation or a musical setting, sounds more inhibited and ‘pretty’ than it ideally should. The sexually impatient atmosphere of 1840 has already made the composer write a duet which Mendelssohn would almost certainly have found in questionable taste; and yet the German version has a bowdlerized aspect to it where the refined conventions of nymphs and shepherds are evoked rather than the unvarnished realities of Scottish rural life. Where Burns has been most helpful to the duet-composer is the way in which real dialogue is outlined in few words where one speaker immediately follows the other in a manner that suggests the terse sotto voce secret assignation (though not a secret, it seems, for long). There is no need here for the literary re-arrangements which had made Liebhabers Ständchen such a complicated musical proposition. Schumann simply pairs the strophes, making three musical verses out of the poet’s six. From the point of view of musical construction the piece is strophic with an extended coda.

The music is once again in that outdoor key of A major as if love were something blooming on branches and waiting to be plucked. It is also difficult to imagine this duet taking place at any other time than May or June, just as the rigours of winter are very much a part of Liebhabers Ständchen. With this sequence perhaps Schumann meant to imply the same two lovers at different times of the year. It could be that ‘if at first you don’t succeed’ is the hidden motto behind the pair of duets; lack of fulfilment is very evident at the end of the first, but the racy postlude of the second implies a rewarding conclusion, for the man at least. (Schumann, after all, ‘got his girl’ in a way that Brahms, composer of that serenade of failed intent, Vergebliches Ständchen, never did.)

The tempo is Allegretto (the piece is often performed as if the composer’s marking had been ‘Allegro molto’, which is a pity). Pulsing triplets pervade the song with cheeky little accents on the off-beats. The sequential tune is gently lobbed between the singers as the ascending progress of tonalities (A major to B minor to C sharp minor) denotes mounting sexual tension. Schumann’s very original use of tiny inflections of rhythmic displacement (an accelerando like blood racing to the head on ‘So fang mich’, followed by more than one teasing ritardando for each singer which pull the music behind the beat) are superbly effective for depicting the coy uncertainty of the girl and the heart-on-sleeve exaggeration of the boy who is prepared to say anything to have his way with her. We note that in Schumann’s version the smug imperturbability of Findlay has been replaced by a much less experienced operator; nevertheless the tenor’s self-consciously operatic mannerisms (a sudden high A on ‘von Herzen’, and a soulful and meaningful elongation of the same word on its immediate repeat) imply an insincerity which is more comic than sinister.

The tenor’s second ‘Von Herzen’ has signalled the end of the first strophe and the music’s return to the home key of A major. The composer dovetails this cadence with the beginning of the second strophe (the soprano’s ‘Und öffnet ich nach deinem Wunsch’) without an intervening interlude; this is an original touch (something too brusque for the polished Mendelssohn for example) which implies that the woman is just as impatient to get on with the conversation as the man. The music is the same as for the first verse; we note how Schumann relishes his staccato basses which are used sparingly (much of this accompaniment is for right hand alone) but which add to a feeling that in this tightly wound music the tenor is waiting to pounce on his prey; in the same was those left-hand staccato octaves deftly nail the harmonic changes. When the girl asks her suitor (here compared to a pigeon which does not appear in the original Burns) whether he will ‘coo’ until daybreak the repetitions of ‘Wohl möglich’ (‘quite probably’) seem to imply a certain rueful self-deprecation as if the lover does not quite promise more than he can actually deliver. Perhaps he is after a much quicker visit, in and out.

The third strophe begins with exactly the same music but there is an elongation of the final section where she extracts the promise of his discretion. If the ‘Gewiss nicht!’ is not very convincing in its own right the composer makes sure that we hear this phrase in different tessituras no less than six times, increasingly breathlessly. The final ‘gewiss nicht!’ is made to coincide marvellously with the return of the home key, and the sensation is that with these last syllables he has actually got his hands physically on the girl. Once again we note that the young man is hot and bothered and not the seasoned Don Juan that the original Findlay undoubtedly is. The final impression is one of rather innocent high spirits and the risqué element of the song is surely not greater than that to be found in some of the partsongs of Haydn. The postlude marked ‘Schneller’ is one of Schumann’s more inventive. In it the music of the bass clef personifies the male suitor who entwines contrapuntally with the female as the two chase each other rather convulsively up the keyboard. If this is meant to imply their actual congress it is all over very quickly with a climax that comes far too soon; the left hand falls away to the bottom of the keyboard in an arpeggio of diminished intervals as if suddenly exhausted. Perhaps the two final, rather dismissive, chords imply ‘much ado about nothing’.

But this is only one way of interpreting the final ten bars. One must remember that the conversation has taken place at a distance where she is inside the house and he outside. The sixths which stretch upwards in both left and right hands are perhaps emblems of passionate embrace which are a prelude to the lovemaking rather than the thing itself. It is also possible that with that first wide interval in the bass at the beginning of the postlude Schumann has imagined the serenader leaping over the cottage fence. After some scurrying he is inside the house and the final two staccato chords are the sound of the latch as it falls into place behind him. The important thing is that the music with which this song ends conveys all the fun of a gleeful conspiracy. We can well believe that Schumann, in the more desperate days of his attempts to win Clara’s hand, had seriously contemplated elopement.

The choice of this poem clearly reflects the newly-married Schumann’s longing to be part of a family; one remembers that both his own parents were already dead by 1840 – indeed he had lost his father when he was still in his teens. This desire for domestic harmony would lead eventually to the normalisation of his relationship with his father-in-law Friedrich Wieck, a man who might have remained the lifelong enemy of a less forgiving man. By the end of 1840 Clara Wieck was already the composer’s bride; he could now see the looming responsibility of paternity. It is this realisation which must have drawn him to a poem by an Austrian author with whom he had little in common (apart from general left-wing sympathies). This is certainly the only poem he set by Grün who was ignored almost totally by lieder composers. It is one of the examples of the composer being drawn to a lyric simply because of its subject matter.

The key to Schumann’s setting is a phrase at the end of the fourth strophe – ‘Und schweigend an uns vorüber / Zog leisen Schrittes die Zeit’. Time goes by second by second, and silently too, but this music gives a sound to the movement of time, expressed in the steady crotchet pulse of the music. A large amount of the accompaniment is marked ‘mezzo staccato’, as if the tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Over this ineluctable march of time (moving forward step by step) broad curves of melody make the connections between the generations. The first verse is a solo with a generous and memorable melody; the composer marks this for ‘Tenor’ although the tessitura is rather low. The music has a stately quality that suits the idea of the grandparents sitting together in the greatest tranquillity as they remember the past. Perhaps it is this suggestion of deeply rooted tradition that is the link between this F major melody and that for Die Lotosblume from Myrten in the same key.

The younger married couple is introduced in the second verse with the addition of the soprano voice. The higher tessitura immediately suggests something blossoming – youthfulness and hope. The tenor is here made to go much higher in the stave while the soprano goes lower, a combination which makes a vocal blend both heady and intimate. The third verse introduces the idea of a brooklet and of water music in flowing quavers, a welcome change of texture from those stately crotchets, but in musical and literary terms more red herring than trout. Only a gene pool would have been truly relevant to the subject of the poem. We soon return to the imagery of rustling trees and that crucial statement about the steps of time. In the fifth verse (‘Stumm blickte aufs junge Pärchen’) the staccato chords almost comically suggest the blinking of the aged couple at their younger relations and vice-versa. For sixteen bars the melodic flow is interrupted as the home territory of tonality (F major) shifts to A flat major; it is as if time is standing still as both couples confront their mortality, their responsibilities, and their role in each others’ lives. (One remember however that the use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in this duet shows that it is sung from the point of view of the younger married pair with their entire lives before them – grandmother and grandfather are conveniently mute.)

The sixth verse emphasises the difference between the couples. The two old people have only their past to look back on; in the space of four bars A flat major shifts into the rather dismal regions of B flat minor in honour of the word ‘Vergangenheit’ (‘the past’). The young pair (by implication Robert and his Clara) are as yet unaware of what is still in store for them; their future is depicted by a succession of harmonic changes which make it seem that successive tonal vistas with unknown resolutions open up before their (and our) ears. The D flat in the B flat minor chord raises a semitone to become the D natural in a G7 chord. This in turn leads to C major and thence to the open horizons of C7 for the voices’ final cadence on the phrase ‘ferner, künftiger Zeit’. The singers leave the scene with a musical question mark. There is a real sense here of peering into a crystal ball, of pulling back a large curtain as if the future is about to be unveiled.

What is unveiled in fact is a long piano postlude of twenty bars. This is nothing less than a solo piano version of the noble melody with which this duet has opened – here revealed as a march of time, triumphant in its ability to carry all before it, yet neither happy nor sad. This is the music of inevitability. This makes the point that youth will play its part before having to hand over to the next generation. The music has been planned to come full circle, as if a snake were biting its own tail – an ancient symbol for eternity which Goethe cited in his poem Um Mitternacht which described how his old age seemed to connect seamlessly with the experiences of his boyhood.

The poem’s title, Familien-Gemälde, suggests that Grün is scanning, and describing, a family portrait where two couples are depicted on a canvas: his grandparents sit on one side and he and his wife on the other. He does his best to discern the different expressions on the faces of those who have sat for the painting. Schumann’s music has a stiffness about it as if he had deliberately given a fixed and unmoving aspect to the people described in the poem. The pace suggests something old-fashioned and carefully posed; we might also imagine a large framed sepia photograph at which we peer in search of clues from the past which will enable us to make sense of the present. But it is the future which will forever remain a mystery. The irony is that the faces of the young couple also belong to those who have long since lived their time, and we cannot help imagining the young Schumanns in that position. What must it have been like for Robert and Clara to contemplate the open spaces of their future in 1840? It seems cruel to us, however inevitable, that they were to face tragic events which are now musical history and common knowledge. In 1879 Clara composed a march based on this melody to celebrate the golden wedding of her friends, the Hübners of Dresden.

Count Anton Alexander von Auersperg, better known by his pen-name Anastasius Grün, was a poet and politician in Carniola, and famous in his day for his versified attacks on the Metternich regime in Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten (1831). Schumann, despite his leftist political tendencies, chose not the political verse but the tender depiction of generational love in ‘Familien-Gemälde’. In mirrored sweetness, a young couple and their loving grandparents contemplate one another. In 1840, Robert’s hopes for a loving family life were high indeed; the ticking clock and Time’s passage, recorded in the staccato beats of the ‘leisen Schrittes die Zeit’, were meant to lead to a future such as this one. It is an epitome of sadness that Robert and Clara were denied this vision (the hope of all lovers) by disease and death.